One Hundred Percent Lunar Boy (31 page)

“No, sir. I’m just the fish that got away.”

Still staring at the ground, Hieronymus focused on a pebble as he felt the officers gently move his arms around his back and lock his wrists with plastic cufs.

The police spoke to each other in hushed tones.

“Something has just occurred to me. Maybe these kids are not lost at all. Maybe they knew exactly what they’re doing out here. Maybe they were helping this guy Hieronymus escape to the far side of the Moon.”

“Excuse me, Officers?” Slue interrupted.

Then there was silence, followed by incoherent mumbling, paniclike praying and frightened crying, and when he finally turned around and looked up, Hieronymus saw the two police officers crawling on their knees in states of absolute confusion and Slue just standing there before them, her goggles up on her forehead, her wonderful, beautiful eyes so vivid in their fourth primary color. She smiled at Hieronymus as the two symbols of authority were reduced to groveling at her feet, as if she were an avenging goddess.

Hieronymus ran over to Bruegel, who still sat in the dirt by his mother’s Pacer. The large fellow was in a state of complete bewilderment. He was about to get arrested. Then the cops were going to do him an enormous favor. Then the cops suddenly arrest Hieronymus. Then Slue just looks at them and they collapse.

“Bruegel. Whatever you do—don’t look at Slue in the eyes.”

“What’s going on?”

“It’s very hard to explain. Listen. We have to get out of here right now. Do you have a knife or something sharp?”

“In the toolbox.”

“Good. Get a blade and cut these handcuffs off.”

One of the police officers had curled himself up into a fetal position. The other was slowly attempting to crawl away. The first thing Slue did was take their pistols away from them and toss them into the distance as far as she could. Then she went back to the officer who was on his hands and knees, and with her goggles still up on her forehead, knelt before him, blocking his way. He stopped, unable to resist glancing again at the forbidden, illogical eye color again. His face went blank, and his mouth hung wide open. She knelt forward, and cupped his cheeks in the palm of her hands. “Don’t be afraid,” she said to him.

You will have no memory of this. This incident with the three teenagers and the Pacer in the middle of the wilderness never happened. Look me in the eyes. It never happened. You never met us. The name Hieronymus Rexaphin means nothing to you. You will go back to the car, and you will completely erase all data that you may have downloaded on the car’s computer during the past half hour. You and your partner will completely forget this incident. You will drive back to the exact spot where you only thought you saw a girl waving a cloth. You will be convinced that it was an optical illusion. If you have had any communication with any authorities regarding three teenagers in a Pacer, you will tell them that it was a mistake. You do not have your pistols because you both misplaced them somewhere at the station. If you feel disoriented, it is because you were overcome with car exhaust, and you both had to stop and rest. This conversation we are having now will be completely forgotten. If at any time you should see our faces again, you will not recognize us. You have never seen me. You have never seen my eyes. As far as you are concerned, the fourth primary color does not exist. You know nothing of the case of Hieronymus Rexaphin…

By the time Bruegel finished cutting through the plastic handcuffs to release Hieronymus, Slue had repeated the same thing to the other disoriented officer, who remained shivering in a fetal position. She then went over to the cruiser and retrieved their ID cards. She also took a handheld device.

Her goggles were back in place over her eyes when she approached the two boys.

“You are out of your mind.” Hieronymus said to her matter-of- factly.

“You should be thanking me.”

“Technically, you have just willingly assaulted two police officers. You are now in much worse trouble than I am.”

“Bruegel,” she said, ignoring Hieronymus. “Is it true what you told the policeman? That you fixed the Pacer?”

“Yes.”

“Then let’s go.”

“We are not going anywhere!” Hieronymus looked over at the disoriented cops crawling on the barren surface of the Moon. “We can’t leave them like that! We have to take them to the hospital!”

“They tried to arrest you!”

“What am I, a criminal? If they’re told to arrest me, then they have to arrest me. I am not going to go around hurting anyone trying to escape the fact that I broke the law last night! I did something last night that is extremely illegal! I should not have looked at that girl! But I’m stupid and I’m weak and I did it and now I have dragged you and Bruegel into it! I’m going over to that police cruiser, I’m turning on their radio, I’m calling an ambulance, and I’m going to wait right here and I’m going to turn myself in! I’ll tell them that I was the one who looked at them. I’m taking full responsibility!”

But Slue would have none of that.

“That’s just a load of skuk, Hieronymus! You’re a coward! You’re passive, as usual! It won’t help you to do that, anyway.”

“Slue, there is nothing in the world that will make me leave this spot!”

“Really?” she asked him.

“Really! Nothing!”

Slue walked up to him and kissed him on the mouth.

Within minutes, they were in the Pacer. Bruegel was driving, and they were heading in the direction of the far side of the Moon.

Clearly, Slue was now in charge of the expedition. She told Bruegel to drive directly toward a pair of high, craggy mountains on the horizon. Bruegel was beside himself with embarrassment over the discovery that he did not really have a driver’s license, and so his usual cocky and anarchistic exterior was replaced by this new and rarely seen side—that of a boy so shy he could hardly speak, and yet, for the first time in his life, emboldened with a newfound sense of focus.

Hieronymus kept wondering to himself,
how long did we kiss? She kissed me…and she did it…as if it were the most logical thing to do…

Those police officers could be dying.

Don’t worry, they’re not.

How do you know? Not only did you look at them, you took their faces in your hands and you forced them to look at you again! What did you say to them?

I told them what I knew they were about to do.

What are you talking about?

You know full well, Hieronymus. As soon as I looked at those two offficers, I knew, judging by their trail of projected color, that they would lay on the ground for a while, then they would get up, they would walk to their vehicle, they would sit and wait till they felt normal again, they would forget all about meeting us here, then they would drive back to where they came from.

Why are you telling Bruegel to drive to the far side of the Moon?

Because when I looked at the Pacer, I saw and thus I knew that the three of us would climb back inside. I saw the direction the Pacer would go. Its color projection traveled exactly to where those two mountains are.

You knew that we were going to go there?

Yes.

Did you know that you were going to kiss me?

Yes. But…

But what?

I don’t think I needed to take my goggles off to know that.

Bruegel was driving incredibly fast, but the mountains ahead of them appeared only slightly bigger. Slue took out the handheld object she had taken from the police car.

“What are you holding?” Hieronymus asked her.

“It’s a Police Omni-Tracker.”

“What the Pixie is that?”

“It’s a portable navigation device—but a very special one. Only the police are allowed to use these. In theory, it is supposed to keep track of every person on the surface of the Moon.”

Slue pressed a button, and a fat translucent projected map-like image bounced into the air in front of her. A flashing red dot appeared upon what could only have been a representation of the countryside. The dot moved swiftly. Slue pointed to it.

“This is us,” she said. “This blue dot indicates the position of the Omni-Tracker.”

“At least we know where we are,” said Hieronymus. “So not only have you showed your eyes to a pair of police officers, which is the same as assault, in case you forgot—but you have also stolen state property.”

“The police won’t notice right away that this is missing, but when they do, they will think they left it along with their guns at the station.”

“How are you so certain of this?”

The mountains loomed larger in the distance. The Pacer was moving with a greater fuidity than ever before. What Bruegel was unaware of was that in making his repairs, he unintentionally fushed away a blockage in the fuel-feeder that had been hampering the vehicle’s performance for years.

Slue looked at Hieronymus.

“I am certain because…there is another reason the authorities are so fearful of the fourth primary color. It is not just that a person becomes disoriented. The mind becomes so unhinged while viewing this color that memories can be taken away and false memories can be inserted…”

“You mean, as in hypnotized?”

“No,” Slue replied, a sad expression on her face. “Much deeper than that. When a normal person sees the fourth primary color, as you know, their mind becomes deeply confused. It has to reboot itself. A human being becomes like putty during those moments. They can be told anything, and for them, it becomes the truth. By now, those police officers are emerging from their confused state. And they will both be convinced of the exact same thing. That the exhaust of their cruiser made them pass out. That I was an optical illusion when I waved my poncho at them. That they never met us. And all this because I told them so.”

“How did you know this, Slue?”

She looked at him, and with the hills to the side of her passing, the light outside fading, her blue hair becoming a neutral mass of waving strands in the wind that passed through her partially opened window, she smiled at him.

“How do you know this, Slue?”

The Pacer passed between the two mountains and continued directly into the abyss. Hieronymus and Slue both knew they were on the far side of the Moon, as the Earth was nowhere in sight. The sky above was no longer red, but a dull, dark purple. The light was dim. The terraformation of the far side was very different from the near side. There were sections where the grass grew taller, wavier, and covered the hilly countryside in ominous patches.

A hummingbird the size of a dog flew directly in front of them, almost colliding with the Pacer. Bruegel was shocked. “Did you see that bird!” he shouted.

Slue returned her attention to the projected image from the OmniTracker. Then she began typing on the small device.

“What are you doing?” Hieronymus asked.

“Preparing your defense.”

“Defense? I have no defense,” Hieronymous slumped back into his seat with a sigh of inevitability. “No matter what we do, they will find me. They will put me away. And then—”

“—they will force you to pilot Mega Cruisers till your eyes pop out. Yes, well, we are going to see to it that you don’t.”

“How is that?”

The engine beneath them purred as the wheel that encircled their vehicle ran over the bumpy terrain.

“By challenging the way the law is applied. By exposing the government’s methods of abusing Quarantine Directive Number Sixty-Seven. By exposing the fact that the laws that govern us have been edited without the public’s knowledge. Because of ’updating’. It is the printed word of law that controls everything, but you know, my brother Raskar, is right. Those printed words have been changed and not to our beneft. Do you know that there has never been a trial for any One Hundred Percenter accused of looking at anyone without their goggles?”

“What?”

“Indeed. Your goggles fall off. You look at someone. That person is momentarily incapacitated. You are arrested. And you disappear. No trial. Nothing. Nobody questions anything because most people are terrified of us. And we are all terrified of one another. But it is unconstitutional, it is illegal, and I am sure, now that I think about it, considering what the girl from Earth told you, that there are secret deals between the Lunar Government and the corporations that run the Mega Cruiser lines, if not all the high-speed traffic throughout the solar system. They break the law, they use us, they make money.”

Slue pressed another button, and a map of a familiar lunar city appeared in front of her. Aldrin City, which was not too far from Sun King Towers. A flashing blue dot appeared in the middle of what appeared to be an elaborate compound of roads and tall concrete buildings.

“Okay,” Slue continued, pointing to the blue dot. “That’s your father. That’s the Aldrin City Prison. No surprise. Your father is in jail.”

Hieronymus only gritted his teeth. He felt sick at this realization, and he felt horribly guilty.

“Are you sure he is in jail?” he asked, hoping that maybe his father was just there for questioning.